Where beer geeks get offended. Welcome to the world of beer as viewed by the founder of the New Albanian Brewing Company in New Albany, Indiana, who reminds you that beer is far too important to be left to Rate Advocate.

Saturday, August 16, 2014

These requests from abroad, volume three: "I am writing to ask if you could help me to increase my collection."

If you own a brewery or work for one, you may have fielded e-mail inquiries from overseas asking for beer labels, crown caps and the like, as destined to become cherished keepsakes of private collectors who've heard of your beer, even in far-off Belarus or the Kalahari.

To me, there is something haunting about the foreign requests, which tend to come from Central/Eastern European locales, these being places of longtime personal interest to me historically and geographically. They stoke my inner melancholic, and for the life of me, I don't know why.

Lately, I've been pasting their addresses into Google Map and seeing what their places of residence look like. Here are the most recent ones.

Krzysztof lives in Wrocław, the fourth-largest city in Poland. It appears to be a pleasant, newer housing development outside the city center.

It took some thought and head-scratching to find Roman's and Igor's house in Lviv, Ukraine, which is a place I almost visited once in the mid-1990s until the length of the train ride from Slovakia deterred me. Instead, we went to Hungary and got juiced in Eger.

In their request, the brothers' chosen English transliteration of the Cyrillic came out as Ogienka Street, which would not register as a search. Fortunately, I have a bare-bones familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet (actual language proficiency is another matter), and eventually got the right letters in a process that can be quite variable: Not Ogienka, but Ohijenka Street.

Is it one of them coming out the door in this 2011 street view?

Let's hope no privacy protocols are being violated by my depicting their buildings, seeing as there's a drone hovering outside my front door even as I type.